Hello friends: Due to recent Larian updates and TRIPS OLD SHADERS existing this mod will go through a big development soon (hopefully this December). If you have not downloaded this mod yet, you may wish to wait as I might have to redo all the textures (big download).

This will address two issues:
1> some Larian updates have broken my textures (because they replaced them lol)
2> with Trips Old Shaders I can finally properly shade metals and fabrics (yay!) so everything will look better.


Kofi **rattles tip jar**


TL;DR:
Upscales all the armour and clothes I could find (anything your character equips except weapons) by a factor of x2 to better match the quality level of the faces. (WIP)


WHAT:
Covers anything I could find** that contains the string "*ARM*" for armour and "*CLT*"  + (some others I found manually) which includes:

• Head slot (helmet, circlet, hood, etc.)
• Chest slot (armour, robes, etc.)
• Feet slot (boots, shoes)
• Camp Clothing slot (camps clothes)
• Camp Feet slot  (camp shoes)
  

Furthermore, anything that was already 4k (4096x4096), I don't want to increase to 8k (8096x8096), as it is waste of space

WHY:
For the most part I don't think BG3 needs an upscale due to having top-down gameplay, but you get close-ups with the characters quite often and it is jarring to see the HD heads with LD armour. This is a pretty easy fix with presumably low impact on the game (See FAQ for specifics).

This is an example of the dye mapping as that was the most egregious (This controls the color of armour and was similar to pixel art).

fig 1.  MSK texture map comparison

fig 2. in-game comparison of MSK difference.

INSTALL:

• Open Zipped folder downloaded from this nexus, which will have "Generated" folder inside.
• Place "Generated" folder inside "Baldurs Gate 3\Data\" folder. For steam this is "SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Baldurs Gate 3\Data".
  
• Profit.
  

FAQ:

why BC1/BC3 not BC7? 
Despite being a DX11/DX12 game, a lot of the shaders don't accept BC7. Leaving it uncompressed bloats the file size by a factor of 4 so I just went with BC1 or BC3. 

performance impact?
Probably only initial zone load times (meaning slightly longer loading screens), although you might stutter if the GPU doesn't have enough VRAM. The amount of VRAM used for specifically armour/clothing will be increased by a factor of 4. e.g.: If Gale's armour was 5MB in VRAM before using this mod, after it would be 20MB of VRAM. This is probably negligible (non-issue) for any newer card with 4GB or more VRAM (unless you are playing in 4k resolution, in which case I recommend using NVidia DLSS (specifically replace the current BG3 DLSS version with the ones mentioned in this thread: PSA for DLSS )).

upscaling method?
Using ESRGAN model in CHAINNER:
Cleaning: BCGONEV4 1x on each channel (R,G,B)
Upscale: lollypop 4x on each channel (R,G,B,A (if A exists)),
Colourmatch Upscale to Cleaned version (lollypop introduces slight colourshift)
Downscale: 0.5x box to get to x2 the original size
Compress using microsoft texconv (cuttlefish texture tools didn't seem much better tbh) to BC1/BC3 w/mipmaps

texture mass:
original mass: ~??GB
upscaled mass: ~16GB
Remember resolution scale factor effects both width and length, resulting in a squared increase: (n^2)(s), where n is scale factor, and s is size. So, n=2, s=2GB: (2^2)(2GB) = 8GB, minus 853MB for the 18 8k textures I had to remove, so about 7GB.
zipped mass: ~1GB

not all the armour is better!
Believe me I know. I am still digging.

Some of the armour looks different!
I had to redirect VTEX to DDS, and because of that I couldn't use some VTEX exclusive shaders (90% of shaders had a 1-1 match tho).  Which means certain armour doesn't shade correctly (see sorcerer metal bits on the armour) I'm looking for a better solution. Decide what you like more, HD textures or metallic shaders.

credit:
shinyhobo; bg3-modders-multitool
joey; chainner
xinntao; ESRGAN
Mutin Choler; BCGONE models
LyonHrt; lollypop model
norbyte; lslib/exporttool

permission:
I don't care what you do with this.